


The Time Given to Us

by orphan_account



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: (sorry Takeshi), Alternate Universe - World War II, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Japanese-American Katsuki Family, M/M, Mentions of Crimes Against Humanity, Mentions of War Crimes, Minor Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-World War II, everyone has PTSD, specific wwii related triggers clarified in beginning notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 06:09:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20737472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: In the middle of the night, Victor wakes up starving.or,The war is over, but things can't go back to normal quite so easily.





	The Time Given to Us

**Author's Note:**

> so back when I first joined the fandom all those years ago, i wanted to write a wwii au with soviet soldiers victor and yuri, and japanese american soldier yuuri. it was gonna be a large sweeping epic, going year by year, touching on all sorts of major events...
> 
> and then i realized how much goddamn research that would be
> 
> so! here's a teeny little remnant of it. it's set after the war is over and victor has gone to live with the katsukis in hawaii, but he, of course, is still dealing with ptsd from everything he saw during the war, as is yuuri. 
> 
> a note on some of the things mentioned in this fic: victor spent most of the war in st petersburg, then known as leningrad, which was under siege pretty much the whole way through. the nazis completely cut off all routes out, causing massive food shortages, and millions of people died both from bombing raids and from starvation. he also makes a couple brief references to concentration camps, which i didn't want to really go into but figured it was unavoidable considering the soviets liberated a large number of them.
> 
> the katsukis, being japanese american, make a lot of references to internment camps. the katsukis themselves weren't in them (i wanted to make a distinction between the experience of japanese americans in hawaii, which did have internment camps but didn't force everyone to live there, and the mainland, which rounded up 100% of japanese americans and put them in camps) but various other characters in the fic were
> 
> writing wwii fic is really hard because everything was so awful all the time. i wouldn't want to write like, a yoi fic set during the holocaust, but writing anything set during wwii without making mention of that seems a little disingenuous. i'm rambling i guess, this fic (i hope) makes it clear the mental toll the war and other things related to it had on people. that's.... kind of it, just characters struggling with ptsd for 5000 words sldkfjhslkdjfh

In the middle of the night, Victor wakes up _starving_.

Suddenly, it’s as though he can’t breathe for the terror searing through his entire body. He’s so, so hungry, his stomach eating itself, his hands shaking and his breath coming in short bursts.

Loud, screaming sounds echo in his ears, an unending, alien buzzing, and Victor throws the covers off of himself and tumbles to the floor, stifling his screams behind his hands. He needs food, he needs it, he needs to eat-

Everything about this place is unfamiliar. Victor half runs half falls down the stairs, trying hard not to cry, out of his mind with fear. He can’t find the kitchen, but he can’t turn on the lights to find his way, and he lets out a little yelp of pain as his hip bangs into the sharp corner of a table.

Fuck, it hurts, it _hurts, _how’s he going to make it to a shelter if the alarms go off, but he can’t think about that now-

There’s a loaf of bread on the kitchen counter in a plastic bag.

Victor fumbles for a moment, trying to find the opening, before giving up and ripping the bag open with his bare hands. Slices of bread fall to the floor, but Victor doesn’t care. He tears a hunk from the two slices gripped in his hands, swallowing without chewing, then bites off more, more-

His mouth is full of bread, he nearly chokes trying to swallow the torn off bits, but he needs to satiate the hunger in his gut or he’ll die, he’s _so hungry-_

“-tor. _Victor!_”

Victor gasps, and a bit of bread flies into the back of his throat, and suddenly he’s on his knees, coughing, bread flying out of his mouth and splattering on the ground. He coughs, and coughs, gasping and wheezing for breath, and when a hand holds out a cool glass of water he takes it, gulping it down his parched throat.

“Victor.”

He recognizes that voice.

The light comes on.

“_No_,” Victor yelps, “No, they’ll see us-”

Strong hands hold him back.

“Victor, it’s your Yuuri,” the voice comes again. “The war is over, my darling.”

Suddenly, reality comes creeping back.

The room comes creeping back.

Victor looks up into Yuuri’s worried, watery brown eyes, and begins to weep.

Yuuri’s arms wrap around him, smelling like the detergent on their bedsheets and just the faintest sting of tobacco, a habit Yuuri swears he’s going to quit but it’s just so hard when Takeshi’s lighter is all he has left of him.

He’s in the Katsuki’s kitchen, in the private home right beside their hotel in Hawaii. The floors are black and white linoleum, the light is fluorescent, appliances Victor had only seen in shop windows back home are lined all along the countertops.

Bits of torn up bread and a disgusting gob of what was in his mouth are strewn on the floor all around him.

“I’m sorry,” Victor sobs, “I’m so, so sorry Yuuri, I woke up and I was so hungry-”

“I can’t understand Russian, baby,” Yuuri murmurs, kissing Victor’s temple as he weeps in his arms.

English is hard right now. Victor’s Leningrad apartment is still there out of the corner of his eye, solemn and dark.

“Hungry,” he manages in English. Then, voice breaking, he continues. “No more bread. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Yuuri soothes him. “You’re safe now, Vitya, you’re safe. We’ll just get some more at the store, remember? We can just go to the store and buy some more bread.”

“Right,” Victor breathes shaking all over, tears still streaming down his cheeks, “Right, I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m s-safe-”

The screaming in his ears was just the crickets chirping outside. The lap of the waves and the buzz of a fan are soothing, calming, and completely unfamiliar – so much so that hearing them makes it easier to remember where he is, as does the way the air sticks to the back of his throat like thick soup.

Victor’s heartbeat slows, and he buries his face in Yuuri’s neck, whimpering. He can’t even remember what he was dreaming of, only the searing, burning hunger in his belly when he woke up.

He spent years of his life _so fucking hungry_.

“What are you looking at?”

Victor jolts up at the anger in Yuuri’s voice.

The surroundings come back to him, his old apartment fades away. Suddenly, he sees what’s around him, sees beyond Yuuri’s arms and body cradeling him.

Hiroko, Toshiya, and Mari peer down the stairs, Yuuko covers her mouth with tears in her eyes by the pull out bed she’s sleeping on with the triplets. The children peer up over the edge of the couch, eyes wide. Everyone’s staring at him, the women with their hair curlers in, Toshiya and Hiroko half-blind without their glasses but afraid all the same.

Humiliation pools in his gut.

“I’m sorry,” Victor babbles up at everyone, looking around wildly, “I’m sorry, I’m s-sorry-”

“You have nothing to – stop _looking at him_,” Yuuri snaps, voice sharp with anger. “Go away, all of you, stop, he’s not, there’s nothing wrong with him, _stop looking at him!_”

“Yuuri,” Mari tries, gaze dropping to the floor.

“_Make the girls stop looking at him_,” Yuuri shouts, waving his hands at the triplets. “Stop it, just -_why do you keep staring at him?_”

Victor hears one of the triplets whimper. Yuuri is breathing hard, eyes flashing with anger.

“Yuuri,” Victor whimpers. “Don’t-”

“Don’t yell at them,” Yuuko snaps immediately, “They don’t know any better. Girls, please, just-”

“Like that makes it okay?” Yuuri shouts. “He’s not a circus attraction Yuuko, you don’t get to look at him like he’s some freak, like you pity him, like he’s pathetic.”

“I don’t think he’s pathetic,” Yuuko yells back, astonished, “But don’t you dare yell at my kids. They just don’t-”

“_You don’t understand_,” Yuuri cries, standing up now, and Victor whimpers and wraps himself around Yuuri’s knees to keep him close. “You don’t know what it’s like, having to deal with what happened, feeling like you’ll wake up and see the forests in Germany, you don’t have someone who you want to protect who went through _hell_ and it kills you to see them suffering-”

“_Enough_.”

Victor has never heard Hiroko raise her voice before, but it sends a chill right down to his bones.

“Oh,” Yuuri breathes, and suddenly Victor realizes the mistake Yuuri made. “Oh. Yuuko, no, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean-”

The steps creak as Hiroko descends, the sound making Victor jump. He hears Yuuko sniffling, and it breaks his heart. He knows what it’s like to lose his family – Yuri might be alive, Victor doesn’t know, and he’ll never know because he ran away to America because he’s just as weak and pathetic as they all think he is.

“I’m so sorry,” Yuuri says again, voice high-pitched and horrified. “Yuuko-”

“You’re right,” Yuuko rasps, voice thick with tears, “I don’t know what it’s like. I’ll never get to-”

She cuts off, sinking back onto the mattress in tears. Hiroko wraps her arm around Yuuko’s shoulders, whispering soft, sweet words. When Yuuri steps forward, miserable and uncertain, Hiroko shakes her head minutely.

The grief on Yuuri’s face pierces Victor. Yuuri’s told him about him and Takeshi’s time in their regiment, how Yuuri heard the bomb go off, how Yuuri held him as he took his last breaths but it wasn’t until the day was over and all was quiet Takeshi’s death settled into Yuuri’s guts, ugly and twisted like the bombed out gashes in the earth.

“I’m sorry,” Victor rasps in the painful silence, “This is all my fault.”

“No,” comes the instant response, from Yuuri, and Yuuko, and Hiroko, Mari, Toshiya all at the same time.

“We’ll clean up,” Mari says, softly. “You and Victor head back to bed.”

Yuuri’s hands are shaking. He looks desperately at his mother, comforting Yuuko, at his father, his sister, like he wants some kind of validation from them.

“I can help,” Yuuri says, voice wavering.

“Victor needs you,” Hiroko says, still rubbing Yuuko’s trembling shoulders as she cries.

“Right,” Yuuri stammers, “Right. I can be – I can be helpful. I’ll...”

He helps Victor up, awkwardly. Victor feels like he’s run for hours and hours, and he leans heavily against Yuuri’s body, burying his face in Yuuri’s neck again. He doesn’t want them to see him like this. He doesn’t want to be like this. He wants to be free of the memories of starving, of bombs, of the terror of bringing supplies across the unending ice of Lake Ladoga, knowing it was risk death or die of hunger.

Victor knows he’ll never be cold here, but some days the cold of that first winter of the siege creeps down Victor’s spine and makes him want to put on a thick down coat even in the Hawaii heat.

He barely notices when they’s back in their cramped little room, and Yuuri sinks shakily onto the creaky mattress.

Alone in the quiet of their room, everything washes over Victor all at once. The fear recedes, replaced by humiliation, frustration, and a deep pain throughout his entire body.

“I feel sick,” Victor whispers, eyes filling with tears. “Your entire family, I woke them up-”

“It’s alright,” Yuuri breathes, shaking his head, “It’s alright, baby. They understand.”

“I feel _awful,_” Victor sobs, burying his face in his hands, “I want to feel better. I just, oh god, Yuuri, I was so _hungry_.”

“I know,” Yuuri soothes, wrapping his arms aroun Victor, holding him so close that his breath ghosts along Victor’s cheek.

“There was a little girl,” Victor gasps. “She saw me in the streets. She recognized me from the posters, from that film they made, and she offered me a piece of bread, her only rations for the day, a piece of bread for the fucking hero of the Soviet Union. I should have said no, I should have let her have it, she was just a little girl and she needed the food, but I was so hungry-”

“It’s alright,” Yuuri says again, his own eyes filling with tears, “Hush, darling, it’s alright.”

“I don’t know what happened to her,” Victor sobs. “I don’t know if she made it out. So many people starved, I saw them lying in the streets, dying and starving, children and babies and I didn’t know when it would end, I thought it would never ever end, the hunger, the death, I can’t breathe, Yuuri, I can’t-”

Yuuri hums something, rocking Victor back and forth, and Victor struggles hard to breathe against the onslaught of _everything_. It’s been a few months since he moved to Hawaii with Yuuri, a few months since he sunk to his knees in the middle of a bombed-out building in Berlin and begged Yuuri not to make him go back, that he didn’t want to be a hero he just wanted it all to be over.

It’s been a few months, and Victor thinks it won’t ever be over, not really – not for him, not for Yuuri, who takes double the prescribed dose of Barbital because otherwise he’ll wake in the middle of the night, shouting names of people Victor never met because they died on the beaches.

Victor understands that somewhere in his rational mind, but that part of him is overwhelmed by the constant revisitation of the starving winters in Leningrad, both corpses and live bodies barely more than skeletons. When he looks in the mirror, he sees that body sometimes, though he knows he’s long since filled out again.

It’s so much to bear, the memory of it all.

Yuuri places something at Victor’s lip.

“You know you’re not supposed to give me your sleeping medicine,” Victor mumbles, though he swallows the pill all the same when Yuuri brings a glass of water to his lips.

“The VA won’t give it to you, so I’ll give you anything that helps,” Yuuri says fiercely, bringing Victor to lie with him on the bed.

Victor doesn’t know what will help. He thinks it might be nice to talk about it with Yuri – Yuri, who also knew what it was like to be made a hero during his stand in Stalingrad, who was only reunited with Victor after the war was over, Yuri who is probably still in the Soviet Union, where Victor will never see him again.

His mouth still tastes like bread, and tears spring to the corners of his eyes. Yuri’s hair clipped so short, bags under his fierce green eyes.

The medicine works quick, and before Victor can think on it further, he’s asleep.

* * *

“Mm,” Hiroko says, not even bothering to turn from the stove where she’s boiling water for a hot bowl of miso soup. “I’m just getting some breakfast, Vicchan. Sit, I’ll make you a bowl.”

Victor jolts in the doorway to the kitchen. Warmth spreads through him, and he thinks how amazing it is that this place, these people who are so different from anything he knew in the Soviet Union have felt more like home than anyone else.

Upstairs, Yuuri sleeps deeply, peaceful and medicated. Victor couldn’t force himself to, not when he woke up and couldn’t reconcile his new, soft body with the skeleton in the back of his mind.

The scent of coffee wafts throughout the kitchen, the sputtering of the coffee pot low and soothing. Behind them, on the pull out couch, Yuuko and the triplets make soft, sleepy noises, not quite awake even as Hiroko putters about to start the day.

Victor sits at the table. Plastic crinkles beneath him, his bare thighs beneath his shorts sticking to it uncomfortably.

Hiroko places a mug of coffee and a bowl of hot miso soup in front of Victor, and he sips both of them gratefully. Two slices of toast pop out of the toaster, but the thought of more bread makes him feel a little ill, so he politely declines in favor of soup and coffee.

It’s a strange combination of flavors to his mind, but everything new Victor experiences with the Katsukis feels like a rebirth.

“When I was still living in Japan,” Hiroko says softly, sipping her own coffee, “There was an earthquake. I remember the earth rippling just like the sea, a sound like the world was letting out a long, slow breath.”

Victor nods. He’s never experienced an earthquake, but he knows the feeling of the ground shaking beneath his feet, loud and strange sounds bursting in his ears. When the ground beneath his feet on the boardwalk shifts, he jolts, because moving ground to him means that a bomb has gone off.

“There was smoke, fire. Mari was just a baby, and I remember clutching her and Toshiya as aftershock after aftershock hit, thinking that we would be engulfed in flames and there was nothing I could do to stop my baby from dying,” Hiroko sighs, looking away. “Even after we moved here, I couldn’t forget. I absolutely smothered her as she grew. It was really negative for our relationship, I think. And any time a train jolted too much, or a boat rocked too steeply, I remembered the ground rippling beneath my feet.”

“I’m sorry,” Victor whispers, looking at his soup. “That must have been so hard.”

Hiroko takes his hand, smiling gently. “Vicchan, all this to say, you’re allowed to be hurt by things. You suffered through something unimaginable, and you’re allowed to feel that.”

Tears well up in Victor’s eyes. “I’d walk through the streets, I’d see the corpses, I’d go to bed so hungry I couldn’t think – and thats,” his voice breaks, “that’s what they _wanted_. Even the little children, they wanted them to starve. I knew it, I knew they hated me, but the force of it and my empty stomach – I’ve never been so scared. I don’t think I’ll ever stop being scared.”

He starts to cry again. They’ve kept their voices down for the sake of Yuuko on the couch, and Victor claps his hands over his mouth as tears stream down his cheeks.

Hiroko scoots her chair around to sit beside him, and Victor collapses into her arms. She holds him, motherly and warm, and Victor thinks he wants someone to baby him and hold him because his parents died when he was young, and he’s never been allowed to feel softness like this in between trying to survive.

“I wasn’t even happy when we marched into Berlin,” Victor sobs, “We blew up their stone monuments, we drank, we celebrated, but the city was crumbling all around me, and I couldn’t forget the things I’d seen on the way there. I felt like it was choking me, how it could have been me – how many parents had to watch their children die, skin and bones, in Leningrad, in the camps, oh _god_-”

Victor knows he’s no longer being quiet, and guilt gnaws at him, knowing he’s disturbing Yuuko and the triplets. He feels so, so weak, a slave to his awful memories. What would his troops say if they saw him now?

His troops never saw him, though, not really, not him. Yuuri never needed him to be strong, he didn’t want Victor Nikiforov, hero of the Soviet Union – he just wanted Victor. Victor, scared and broken and so, so in love it hurts.

Yuuri, his family, accepts him for who he is. Accepts how much he’s struggling with the aftermath of starvation and veneration and Generalplan Ost.

“It’s easier to breathe, here,” Victor whispers. “I couldn’t stay there. It was strangling me, the pain of everything.”

Hiroko holds him close until he stops crying. It takes a while, but she doesn’t judge him for it.

Victor allows himself, for the first time since this latest episode began, to feel safe, if only for a moment.

* * *

“A bit early in the day to be drinking,” Yuuri mutters, glancing up from the ballet barre.

Minako snorts, tossing her long brown hair behind her ear. “Too early in the day to deal with your lip, certainly.”

Her cheeks are a little flushed, and there’s a glass of something clear in her hand that Yuuri doesn’t believe for a second is water. Minako has always had a taste for fine sake, but since the internment camp it’s become a constant presence in her home, her studio, her life. It makes Yuuri so, so angry to think about it. Some days, he’s so full of anger it can barely think.

His family escaped it, but Minako was a cultural leader in town, speaking in mostly Japanese, hosting classes for second-generation children to maintain their heritage in addition to teaching ballet. Yuuri’s family was more assimilated, quieter. Yuuri hates how quiet he was, hates how he enlisted both because fighting the Nazis was the right thing to do but also because he felt like he needed to _prove_ that his family was loyal – and loyal to what, to a country that hated them anyway?

Yuuri took his stand and feels like he stood for nothing.

“How long have you been here?” Minako asks.

She’s curious, but not accusing. After all, she’s the one who had the key made for him when he was still in school.

Yuuri blows out a breath. “A few hours,” he admits, “I snuck out while Victor was having breakfast.”

Minako raises her plucked eyebrow. “And you let him know where you were going so he wouldn’t start to worry when he saw you were missing?”

Guilt and anger mix in his gut in equal measure. He’s hurting Victor, he’s weak, he can’t do anything right-

“Everyone knows I come here to blow off steam,” He mutters, going into a deep split just to prove that he still can. Yuuri isn’t nearly as flexible as he was before being drafted into is all Japanese-American regiment – wasn’t much time to stretch in between dodging bombs and being called slurs by his own commanding officers.

Minako sighs, leaning gracelessly against the doorpost. She asks, “Rough night?”

Yuuri freezes. He nods, not meeting her gaze.

“For him?”

Yuuri doesn’t answer for a long, long moment. Yes, Victor was the one who had the nightmare last night, but...

He can’t think about that. He’ll go insane if he thinks about how awful he’s been these short months since the war ended. Yuuri doesn’t know what to do with the person he sees in the mirror every morning.

“I got mad,” Yuuri says carefully, coming to a seated position, legs criss-crossed in front of him. Minako wrinkles her nose, and in the back of his head, he hears her snap, _even your sitting has become Americanized_.

Younger Yuuri would have said, giddily, “But Minako, I am American!”

Older, sadder Yuuri isn’t so sure.

“I got mad,” Yuuri repeats. “Victor had a nightmare. He panicked, didn’t know where he was, had a fit and – and they all were looking at him like he was pathetic. I got so mad, I said some things to Yuuko, about, T-Take-”

He cuts off. He still can’t say his friend’s name, each syllable like a knife in his chest. Watching, like a film reel in his mind, Takeshi’s breathing slow, slow, stop.

“I just wanted them to stop looking at Victor like that,” Yuuri whispers.

Minako frowns. She says, voice quiet but echoing so loud in the empty room, “Yuuri, is that really what happened?”

Tears well up in Yuuri’s eyes, and suddenly he’s crying, crying, sobbing in the familiar dance studio, clutching his hair so hard a few strands rip from his scalp. It’s like his heart is trying to claw its way out of his body, like his lungs are going to burst, like the very blood in his body is trying to escape from his veins. It _hurts_, everything hurts so much and so deeply Yuuri doesn’t know if he’ll ever be alright again.

“No,” Yuuri sobs. “No. It’s not Victor I think they’re judging, it’s _me_-”

Yuuri shakes his head, wrapping his arms around himself. He wishes Victor were here to hold him – he loves Minako, but he can’t let her comfort him the way he needs to be comforted. There’s something inside him that can’t accept her affection, that feels like he doesn’t deserve it.

“I’m crying all the time, I’m snapping at them, I dropped a glass the other day and screamed so loud tousan came running downstairs,” Yuuri chokes. “I was bad before but now I’m completely _useless_.”

“Yuuri,” Minako murmurs.

“I didn’t even hear Victor get up,” Yuuri sobs, “He had this awful nightmare, and I didn’t even hear him get up. Yuuko had to shake me awake. The medication, I need it to sleep, but I didn’t wake up for him, I couldn’t protect him-”

He dissolves into tears again, crying like a child on the dance studio floor. He’s so, so weak, and all his family sees it. He wasn’t strong enough to stand up with Minako, spent the war shuttling about from place to place, heart racing constantly in terror, wasn’t strong enough to save Takeshi even though he _knows_ logically there was nothing to be done when the bomb went off-

“Your family doesn’t judge you,” Minako says.

“I _know_,” Yuuri wails. “I know. Somehow that makes it worse. I think they should, Minako, I mean - just look at me.”

Minako sighs. When Yuuri was younger, she would just scoop him up, bounce him around until he stopped crying. He’s too big for that now, and anyway, except for when he’s with Victor being touched makes him feel like his skin is on fire.

“I know there’s nothing I can say to convince you,” she says, heavily. She feels guilty herself, and that just makes Yuuri feel even worse.

Yuuri buries his face in his hands. “Couldn’t protect him,” he mumbles, wanting to claw all of the pain out of his body.

“I’ll just sit here,” Minako murmurs, taking a sip of her drink. “Until you feel better.”

Yuuri sniffles. He presses his shoulder up against hers, and somehow it helps, even if only a little bit.

* * *

Victor naps, curled up on the pull out couch with the triplets. When he has a hard night, he makes it up during the day. Both him and Yuuri are searching for employment at the moment, living off the generosity of his parents, and Yuuri worries for when Victor has to work and can’t take time off to calm down.

Yuuko comes to sit down by the bed with a cup of tea, smiling fondly. Yuuri flinches when she sits beside him, looking down at his feet. He’s apologized again since last night, but it still hurts to remember the look on her face.

“I feel awful,” Yuuri says, again.

Yuuko sighs and shakes her head. “I feel awful too, all the time. I miss our little house in San Francisco. Takeshi had just finished painting the girls’ room before we had to leave.”

Yuuri swallows. He understands all too well, the world moving forward all around him while all he can do is remember the horror of the war, happy memories of going fishing in the lazy, lapping bay with his father marred when the thought of boats is overwhelmed by a rapidly approaching beach in Normandy.

“You know Victor and I would be happy to take the pullout couch,” Yuuri mumbles, because it’s easier not to grapple with the gravity of what Yuuko is saying, the memory of what could have been.

“It’s alright,” Yuuko shakes her head. “This’ll just be until we get our own place. Besides, after the barracks in Manzanar, this seems like the height of luxury and privacy.”

She says it with a bit of a joking lilt, but her words pierce Yuuri in the gut. Tears well up in his eyes, which he quickly wipes at, hoping Yuuko hasn’t seen.

Yuuko puts a comforting hand on his shoulder, just barely touching, and appreciation bubbles up inside Yuuri at how careful she is with him. Yuuko is his oldest friend, they grew up together – little kids exploring the islands and splashing around with all of the brightly colored fishes in the tide pools. Yuuko only moved to California right after getting married to Takeshi, and the distance seemed so insurmountable at the time.

“I don’t want to be like this,” Yuuri whispers. “I want to get better. For everyone, for the girls, for Victor.”

“I don’t know much,” Yuuko says with a tired smile, “But I think it’ll be easier if we... If we work through this together.”

“You know more than me, I think,” Yuuri whispers, tears dripping down his cheeks. He doesn’t bother to wipe them away this time, just letting himself sit with his feelings.

Beside him, Victor slumbers on, face peaceful in his sleep. A wave of protectiveness rushes over Yuuri, and in a rare moment of clarity, he thinks: I want to build a life with him. I want to enjoy my time with him, protect him, love him with my whole heart.

The triplets nap with Victor, and Yuuri tells himself that they’ll grow up in a better world than he did. They’re so young, and hopefully in time, their memories of the internment camp will fade, and they’ll just be happy, carefree little girls.

Yuuri wants to see that.

* * *

Victor wakes, for once not in a nightmare. His stomach is pleasantly full, his arms heavy, his skin pink and plump. Yuuri’s eyes crinkle as Victor wakes, his expression soft, warm like butter on a roll.

“Were you watching over me?” Victor says with a yawn, stretching his body so that he doesn’t hit the triplet still napping closest to him.

“Of course,” Yuuri murmurs, and Victor’s heart soars. “I love you, Vitya.”

Victor’s whole body tingles with the feeling of loving and being loved in return. He remembers being stretched taut like a string, thinking one day he was going to fray completely and _snap_, unable to live with the weight of everything he’d seen, everything he’d been forced to endure.

Then, one day, he did snap – sobbing and gasping for air, wondering how it could feel so much like drowning even when he wasn’t in water. The war had taken his beloved city and turned it into something awful and ugly, each street corner writhing with the memories of death and suffering. Thick black smoke, smelling of burning flesh, coated thick on the back of his throat.

The thought of going back was too much – but he didn’t have to go back. Yuuri saved him, in so many ways, from the first time he pulled Victor’s unconscious body from his burning airplane to the end when he got Victor’s papers printed and said, _Darling, come home with me_.

Victor misses Leningrad sometimes. He misses his favorite foods, the sweeping architecture, Yakov – but he knows it wouldn’t be the same if he tried to go back.

Nothing is the same now.

Yuuri takes Victor’s hand and kisses his knuckles one by one and Victor thinks, _nothing is the same now, and maybe one day I’ll be okay again._

* * *

They go out for ice cream after Victor takes his nap, Victor and Yuuri, while Yuuko takes the triplets to dance lessons with Minako.

Victor naps a lot, and eats a lot, and lives a happy sedentary life at their family home right next to the resort. He goes swimming and marvels at all of the beautiful tropical fish, picks fruit right from the trees and lets the juice drip down his arm as he bites down, laughs at the rainbow of birds that perch on the branches.

It’s given Yuuri a new appreciation for the place he was born, the place he grew up, the place he’ll likely die. It’s truly beautiful - the sunshine, the beaches, bright, sunny beaches with clear water and surfers laughing in English and Japanese and Hawaiian. Not the beaches in France.

Watching Victor get so excited, Yuuri is starting to feel like he might belong here again. The two of them, readjusting to life after everything they’ve been through, holding each other through their first, wobbly steps.

Three of them, including Yuuko.

“Hm,” Victor mumbles, half to himself, tapping his chin at the check out. “I don’t know – chocolate or vanilla? Mm, Yuuri, do I want chocolate or vanilla?”

Yuuri says, “I can get you both, if you’d like?”

Victor’s eyes go very round, sparkling with wonder. “Really?” he gasps, “I can – I can get both?”

He’s as excitable as a child, sometimes. Things Yuuri would take for granted are the most wonderful thing in the world to Victor – it makes Yuuri want to appreciate the world around him even more. How lucky he is to be alive, to be able to buy Victor two whole flavors of soft serve, to be able to watch Victor lick at them cutely, one after the other, on a bench overlooking the beach.

The cones melt down Victor’s fingers, but he barely notices, so engrossed in his ice cream. Yuuri snorts softly and wipes Victor’s hand, pausing to kiss a bit of chocolate beaded at the corner of his mouth.

Yuuri pauses to make sure no one’s seen them, but it’s quiet during the off season, and they’re far enough away from the busiest parts of town.

Victor giggles, seeming so content and giddy that it makes Yuuri’s heart ache. He wishes none of this had ever happened to them, that they could just _be_, eating ice cream by the beach without being weighted down by their memories of the war.

(The last ice cream shop they went to, Victor had frozen in terror when he heard a man speaking German – until he turned and saw him carrying a chubby little toddler in his arms while she squealed and giggled and pointed toward the tub of strawberry ice cream.)

Victor didn’t get to decide what happened to him – neither did Yuuri. Victor didn’t decide to survive while he watched his comrades, his fellow citizens in Leningrad, shrink to skeletons and die in the streets of starvation. Yuuri didn’t decide to live while Takeshi died, the rocking of the landing craft still rippling through his body as he held him.

Yuuri shifts his thoughts to of all the ice cream he is going to share with Victor - to the time he has left in the world. Watching the triplets grow up in a world without their father, but grow all the same. Watching Victor miss a brother hidden behind an iron curtain and wake up screaming, but begin to eat slower and slower as he realizes his meals aren’t going to be snatched away.

Yuuri thinks of what’s in his control – what _he_ can do with the time he’s been given.

Victor cuddles in close to him, smelling sweet like ice cream, soft and radiant in the sunshine.

Yuuri thinks, long and hard, about the future.

At least he and Victor have that much.

**Author's Note:**

> i was wondering how to end this fic and then i thought of that quote from lord of the rings and it made me tear up so i tried to emulate that


End file.
